JOHANNESBURG - The recent manoeuvring by mutually hostile factions within the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies in the tripartite alliance raises questions about whether the alliance can survive in its present form and, if not, what its future might be.

Such disputes generally provoke speculation as to whether one of alliance's three members, the ANC, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) will walk out.

The most frequently talked of scenario is one in which Cosatu withdraws from the alliance and serves as the god-father of a worker's party in opposition to the ANC.

This was a possibility articulated more than a decade ago in a report by Connie September, the then deputy president of Cosatu. The report anticipates three possible future scenarios for Cosatu, one of which, codenamed The Desert, anticipated the withdrawal of Cosatu from the tripartite alliance.

Unlike the scenarios codenamed Skorokoro and Pap ‘n Vleis, The Desert does not have a happy ending. It leads to either revolution or the rise of a rival workers' party to the ANC. The scenario needs to be seen as a prediction that might yet occur, but not a prediction of what will inevitably take place.

Cosatu is highly critical of the ANC today. It accuses the ANC leadership of not fulfilling its promises to the poor. Its strategy is to re-orient ANC policy in a pro-poor direction by a mixture of cajolery and coaxing.

At the same time, however, Cosatu is seeking to increase its influence within the ANC by exhorting its rank-and-file members to become joint members of the ANC in the same way as many members of the SACP hold dual membership of the ANC.

Cosatu undoubtedly played a crucial role in ensuring the election of Jacob Zuma as president of the ANC in December 2007 and is unquestionably seeking to induce Zuma to abandon the pro-market and pro-investor macro-economic policy that he inherited from President Thabo Mbeki.

A discussion document that Cosatu submitted for consideration at the ANC's national general council -which starts on September 20 - is proof of Cosatu;s quest. It envisages the introduction of new category of "super-rich" taxpayers and a "solidarity tax" on the top 10 percent of taxpayers, as well as a strategically targeted programme of nationalisation of important industries, including the mining of gold and coal and the refining of petroleum .

If it fails to persuade Zuma to change tack on economic policy, it may withdraw its support from him and seek to prevent his re-election as ANC president at the ANC's national conference in Bloemfontein in December of 2012.

If Cosatu succeeds in persuading Zuma to shift leftwards, the more conservative ANC members - or "nationalists," as they have been dubbed by the media - will certainly resist the "hijacking" of the ANC by communists and their auxiliaries and, if necessary, withdraw to establish an authentically nationalist ANC.

There is a precedent for that: the breakaway from the ANC by the Africanists and the establishment in 1959 of the Pan Africanise Congress under Robert Sobukwe.

Back then the Africanists saw the adoption by the ANC of the Freedom Charter as an invitation to communists to assume control of the ANC and they referred to the Freedom Charter scathingly as the Kliptown Charter and to its adherents as the Charterists.

In the past week there have been reports that might have a strong bearing on the future balance of power within the ANC-tripartite alliance.

They relate to a call by Cosatu delegates at a bilateral meeting between Cosatu and the SACP, at which Cosatu representatives are reported to have pressed for Blade Nzimande, the general secretary of the SACP, to resign as the party leader, arguing that his role as the minister for higher education in the Zuma cabinet imposed too many demands on him to fulfil his duties as SACP general secretary.

Cosatu's pressure for Nzimande to resign as party general secretary - which he has predictably rejected - is linked to criticism voiced by Cosatu of SACP members serving in the Zuma cabinet. The nub of the complaint is that the SACP members have placed their ANC commitments above their loyalty to the working class. The allegation is made with specific reference to the reputed failure of the communist members of the cabinet to support the recent strike by public servants.

The charge brings to mind the rejoinder that Nelson Mandela made to those who charged that the African nationalists in the ANC were being manipulated and used by members of the SACP to advance communism rather than the liberation of the oppressed black majority. His riposte was to suggest it was more a case of African nationalists using their communist allies to advance a nationalist agenda than the other way round.

The justification of his counter-view is manifest in the end result of the settlement negotiations: the adoption of a liberal constitution as the foundation on which to build a non-racial democracy based on universal adult suffrage and free, open and regular elections.

Those who are wont to write Zuma off should take note of the invuseleo campaign to raise the number of  authenticated ANC members from the just over 620 000 at the time of the 2007 national conference to one-million by its scheduled national conference in 2012, the year that marks the centenary of its founding of the ANC.

It is likely that KwaZulu-Natal - and with it Zuma - will be the major beneficiary of the ANC's recruitment drive over the next 15 months. Indeed, it was reported at the recent Provincial General Council that there were now 192,618 ANC members in KZN.

It should remembered that Zuma is the first Zulu to serve as ANC president since the election of Albert Lutuli in the early 1950s and his tragic death in 1967.

For these reasons it would be foolhardy to assume that Zuma will be unable to win an electoral contest at the ANC's 2012 elective conference. The safest prediction is that the conference is likely to be the scene of a tough contest.

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